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Today we celebrate the birthday (arrival date) of my Lonnie. She arrived three years ago today, and was my very first Iplehouse KID.  I made her a special dress of pale blue lace with pink embroidered flowers, and a pretty pink heart cake....   Before letting the birthday kids open the rest of their gifts, or doing anything else, I thought I would take all their official birthday portraits with their cakes. First Cinnamon, who is the youngest, and turns four every year...  And then the twins, Coco and Holly, who will always be five. Coco loves Owls (among other things), so I made him an Owl cake...  And after her adventures as a fairy with the mushrooms in Pacific Rim a few months back, I just had to make Holly a fairy and mushroom cake....  The three little Tinker Bells are fancy buttons, I was very happy to discover at Fabricland, as I was rather concerned about making tiny fairies. Saved me a lot of work (and frustration)
Today is a special day as we celebrate the 'birthdays' (arrival dates) of three of my small dolls. Cinnamon, my very first tiny, arrived on this day back in 2010. Coco and Holly also arrived on December 15th, a year ago. Since it's a huge amount of work to photograph and post all the goings on at a triple birthday party, I'm going to do it in small instalments.  Everyone had arrived for the party, and then Leona brought in three huge gift boxes. "These are from Aunt Martha. She made them specially for you."  "I wonder what's in them?"  "Oh wow..." said Cinnamon as she pulled out a Christmas sweater with Rudolph on the front.  "Wow..." said Holly, "She shouldn't have."  "Okay you three," said leona," Please put them on so I can take a photo to send to Aunt Martha. Can you please try to put on a smile for her. She put a lot of work into those sweaters."  "You know, I think you got the best one. After all, you do like snowmen, and green is your favourite colour."  "I don't know about you, but I'm so glad my birthday isn't anywhere near Christmas!"  Just a quick note to say that I've FINALLY finished posting all the doll photos from our fall trip on the Favourite Photos of 2015 page. There's seven albums in all, each one linking to the next one. So now there won't be any scrolling through Blog Archives to find them - plus there's way more photos in the trip albums than I posted here in my Blog.
It's going to be one super busy, party week here this week! Four of my dolls will be celebrating their 'birthdays' (arrival dates) - Holly and Coco, who arrived in 2014, and Cinnamon who arrived in 2010, have 'birthdays' tomorrow. While Lonnie, who arrived in 2012, is celebrating two days later. I've been busy setting up the 'doll room' on my dining room table, blowing up balloons, and decorating for the parties, which I suspect may just run all week. The four of them are trying on their special birthday outfits. Lonnie's and Cinnamon's dresses are brand new, as is Coco's vest..  Holly's dress, on the other hand, was the very first thing I made for her a year ago. Charie had given me the piece of beautiful embroidered green lace, when I brought Holly and Coco to her to be painted. I made a pretty 'party' dress, and loved it so much, that it inspired me to take the series of 'birthday' photos for all my smaller dolls this year. So we've come almost full circle. After these four, there's just one more left - Nami, two weeks today.
Lonnie's dress is also from a yard of embroidered lace, which I ordered from the same Etsy shop - Lace Fun - that Holly's lace came from. Erzulie and Elin's dresses were also made from lace from that same shop. They are all her 'coloured mesh laces', but the stock is always changing. I discovered a perfectly good pumpkin in a bag of leaves in the garage recently, and my mice decided to move in. Today they put up their Christmas lights and decorations....     The autumn colours were weeks late when we were passing through northern Ontario, so we decided to spend a day in Algoma, north of Sault-Ste Marie, where all the fall colours were at peak. The day started out foggy, as we waited for the train for the Agawa Canyon tour to go by.....   The train never showed up - we must have missed it - but Holly enjoyed the red maple leaves...  We stopped to make breakfast, and the sun burned off all the fog....   We went back northward along Lake Superior to see the fall colours....  Stopped at Sawpit Point to climb on the rocks....      But in mid-afternoon, the storms moved back in....  And the next morning as we made the final run for home, it was raining again, so we only stopped at the Trading Post in French River to buy a few souvenirs...  And I'M FINALLY DONE!!!!!!!!! YAY!!!! That was some trip!! I took doll photos almost every day, but I didn't realize just how many I actually took, until I got home and downloaded them all.
I still have to finish the two final trip albums in Favourite Photos 2015, and the trip album on my other website, but at least the end is finally in sight. And maybe now I can focus on taking some holiday pictures. Next morning it was cold, overcast, and rather windy again. Near Wawa we stopped to take some photos in the bright red blueberry bushes....  The tiny blueberry leaves were just the right scale.....   We stopped to make breakfast at Old Woman Bay, in Lake Superior Provincial Park, and afterwards went out to explore the beach. It was very cold, as the wind was blowing right off the lake....  But we bundled up nice and warm, so it wasn't too bad....  Next stop was Katherine Cove. It was still cold and overcast....    Later in the day we came across a large patch of knapweed at a lakeside pull-off. It's a very invasive foreign species, but has pretty purple flowers, and the girls wanted to go pick some...    We needed a few groceries....so Leona and Coco went shopping....  I didn't take any photos the first 1,000 kilometres into Ontario, but it was clear that autumn had been delayed by several weeks, and all the trees were at peak colour. The dolls first came out along the north shore of Lake Superior...  Leona took a 'selfie'...  The day was partly sunny with large storm clouds, but at least it was much better than it had been for the last week or so. Near Rainbow Falls Provincial Park, we stopped at a lakeside rest stop...  It was nice to see the sun out again now and then....  Coco went looking for interesting pebbles...  Lonnie found some nice ones for him too...  After leaving the Rockies, and heading east for several hours, we spent the night in Medicine Hat, rocked by wind all night long. The next morning it was back on the Trans-Canada with the wind on our tail. As long as we were straight ahead of the wind it was fine, but if the road curved, the cross-winds were terrible. We stopped at Gull Lake Saskatchewan to make breakfast, and parked behind a transport trailer to block the wind. But Coco and Holly wanted to go outside for a bit.....  The wind was crazy strong....  Storm clouds kept flying by, and occasionally it would rain. We seemed to be riding the front of the storm, with sun ahead, and dark clouds behind....  The boys wanted to have a picture taken with some of the farm equipment in Swift Current...  Saskatchewan is covered with small ponds and marshes, and the wind was whipping up waves in even the smallest ponds. Migrating birds were bobbing on the waves.....  Dust and tumbleweed were constantly blowing across the highway....  At Reed Lake, which is a very shallow large pond along the side of the highway, the road going across was closed because of the severe waves. Birds could barely fight the wind.  We stopped in Mortlach for a break, to check out their last remaining grain elevator.    We stopped for the night in Regina, but during the night the storm overtook us, so next morning, not only did we have wind gusting to 100km, but it was also raining. We drove across all of Manitoba in the storm, but before leaving the Prairies, I wanted to take one final photo of the girls in the wind.......  The wind was so strong that it actually blew their wigs right off their heads. Thankfully they didn't land in a puddle or in the mud! So after putting their wigs back on, I took the photos in the relative 'shelter' of the RV.  Being blown across the Prairies was quite the experience, but bonus - the powerful
tail-winds gave us an extra 30% mileage from each tank of gas! |
AuthorMartha Boers is an award-winning Canadian doll maker and costumer specializing in fantasy and historical-style costumes. Archives
May 2025
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